Abstract

The prevalence of toroidal scroll waves in experimental studies of excitable reaction-diffusion media motivates this study. To understand the dynamics of these structures in three dimensions we study their interactions with a toroidal manifold. Using an eikonal formulation we demonstrate the existence and stability of both rigidly rotating knotted-waveforms and stationary solutions. We also show that the full reaction-diffusion system supports knotted waves, with good quantitative agreement with the eikonal formulation.